Nvidia detonator drivers....what are they?

[shadowjack]

Forgive a newbie question. I use a WIN98SE system with a new Geforce FX 5900 graphics card.

I have downloaded the latest drivers from the nVidia website.

My question is, what are "detonator" drivers? Are they different than the ones on the regular nVidia website? How so? Less reliable? Faster?

Where would I get one?

Forgive the newbie!

 

[Michaelius]

They are old drivers for nvidia cards. Now you get those Forceware drivers but they used to be called detonators only a week or two ago
Oh and they were video card only while you get whole driver pack now i belive (i still use the 52.16 detonators)

 

[sargeduck]

Uhhhh, I thought the ForceWare drivers were for the Nforce 2, which is a motherboard, not a graphics card.
To answer the orginal question, detonators were just a name they gave to their video card drivers to make them sound cool. Same thing for ATI's catalyst drivers. It's just a name.

Is there anything really more to say?

 

[c0d1f1ed]

They started calling them detonator drivers because the first popular gamer cards were the TNT and TNT 2.

 

[shadowjack]

Duh! Thanks. I thought I was missing something. But I assume the drivers for XP are better than WIN98SE ? I have been considering upgrading.

 

[Michaelius]

Quote from the FX5950 previev on [H]ard|OCP

"Det 50s

Today NVIDIA is releasing a new driver set dubbed "Release 50". The driver version is 52.16 and it is WHQL certified. Our stance has been to wait and use an officially released driver when available. We are trying our best not to use drivers that will never be released to the public. Now that the 52.16 is WHQL stamped and publicly available, we can evaluate gameplay using it.

Along with this new driver, NVIDIA is changing up their driver packaging. ForceWare is the suite of software and drivers to power NVIDIA hardware such as their nForce line of motherboard chipsets and their graphic card GPUs. The ForceWare package includes the release 5X Drivers and all the features associated with that such as Digital Vibrance Control, NVRotate, NVKeystone, and Multimedia Software.

ForceWare is to NVIDIA what Catalyst is to ATI."